Why couldn’t it be love? Joe O’Connor on the marriage of Maygan Sensenberger and Rod Zimmer

Why couldn't it be love? Joe O'Connor on the marriage of Maygan Sensenberger and Rod Zimmer

One photograph of Senator Rod Zimmer and his wife, Maygan Sensenberger, pictures them arm-in-arm. In another the 23-year-old is sitting on the 69-year-old’s lap, and in a third she is giving him a big, fat, open-mouthed smooch. There are photos of the blond in a bikini top and photos of the couple on their wedding day. Ms. Sensenberger looked young and radiant in white. The senator, though quite fit, looked like her father (or grandfather).

The popular sentiment — she is in it for the money and he is not in it for the conversation — has been bumping around the blogs, tweets and online newspaper comment sections ever since Canada’s newest celebrity couple emerged somewhere over Saskatoon and concluded their trip in a courtroom.

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Legalities notwithstanding, the court of public opinion passed harsh judgment. Ms. Sensenberger has been branded as, among other things, “white trash,” “a gold digger,” “a trophy wife,” and a “whore.” The senator, meanwhile, is an “old toad,” a “foolish old man,” “a dirty old man,” “an embarrassment,” and a “geezer.”

But…what if she’s not a floozy and he’s not a fool? What if their attraction wasn’t about her being young and pretty and him being old and rich?

Rita Sensenberger, the young woman’s grandmother, told a reporter that her Maygan was an “A student, she loves her husband very much, and he loves her. What more is there to say?”

Another individual close to the family, who wished to remain nameless, told me: “I realize there is a large age difference, but they are very happy together, and they love each other a great deal. He is very good to her, a perfect gentleman.”

The same person said the pair were “friends for a while” before they became an item and that the Sensenberger clan, restaurant owners in Collingwood, Ont., “have their own money and Maygan doesn’t need his.

“Money is not the attraction. The attraction was, he treats her well. He treats her like a queen, and she loves him. People are going so far out in left field skewering Maygan. They have no idea what she is actually like.”

Perhaps her Facebook page can offer us some clues, tidbits hinting at the common ground bridging the 46-year age gap with her husband. Ms. Sensenberger does appear to have an appreciation for weathered things.

Listed among her favourite books is the American classic, To Kill a Mockingbird (along with anything by Stephen King); Johnny Cash is an admired musician (as are punk rockers Sublime); while Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, starring Marilyn Monroe as an, ahem, gold digger, is a favourite movie. Two other Monroe flicks — the Seven Year Itch and Some Like it Hot — make the 23-year-old’s “like” list. All three films came out in the 1950s when her husband was just hitting adolescence.

Pierre Trudeau scandalously loved a much younger woman, and she loved him back, for a time.

Love is a curious thing. We feel it, thumping away in our chests. We know when it is true and when it is fading and when it is gone. But we also know that it is impossible to completely figure out.

There is a mystery to love. When we reduce an older, wealthy man dating an attractive young woman to a tabloid narrative we deny the mystery, and the possibility that perhaps these two actually love one another.

Maybe they are happy, most days, when they are not flying above the Prairies, and maybe our perceptions of who they are is not the sum of what they are.

In the wake of a Grammy Awards ceremony that disappointed many, from Kanye West to the masses on Twitter lamenting the state of pop music, a historical perspective is key. Few are better poised to offer one than Andy Kim.